


The Drugs Talking

by ishafel



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-26
Updated: 2011-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:57:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last thing they need is another President with a narcotics habit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Drugs Talking

The pills are why his father lets him go, he thinks. Because even the CAG's medical record is available to his commanding officer, because after the end of the world even a son isn't allowed secrets from his father.

The round ones help him sleep. The long narrow ones are for his nerves: they keep him flying. The blue ones, the octagons—those are the antidepressants. They keep him going, which is the idea.

It's the one thing neither Tom Zarek nor Romo Lampkin know about, because maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe it does. He can't be the only pilot with PTSD, but he's the only President, the only one the Quorum and the people and the military trust. The only one who can do this particular job. He's ashamed of the pills, either way.

The day after he takes the oath of office he stops taking them. He thinks of Laura Roslin when he does it, of unintended consequences. There's no one he can trust to fill this particular prescription.

The days grow darker and the nights grow longer, but he does his job. He always does his job, and eventually it gets easier to forget that the number on the whiteboard in his office, the number he keeps having to adjust slowly downward, means people.

Sometimes even people he knows. The Olympic Carrier. Kat. Eight Ball. Kendra. Showboat. Callie. He can't do his job if he's thinking about them, so he stops thinking. He dreams about them instead, and so he stops sleeping.

He sits at his desk and fills out paperwork for hours, and he goes to meetings and Zarek smiles at him, and he never sees Kara and he doesn't believe in Earth. If Pegasus taught him anything, it's that you pay and pay and pay and learn not to mind the cost. It's something his father never learned.

He's tired all the time, and he's more alone than he's ever been, and finally he swallows his pride and makes an appointment with Cottle and asks for more pills, because even if he can't be who they want him to be when he's taking them, he can't be who he wants to be without taking them. If Pegasus taught him anything, if Laura Roslin did, it's that there's no room for pride at the end of the world.


End file.
